24 نوفمبر 2008

RIYADH, Sept 25 (Reuters Life!) - Saudi researchers have mapped the first Arab genome in a project to put the Arab world on the global genetic map and improve healthcare.

Geneticists from Saudi Biosciences say unlocking the genetic profile of 100 people from Saudi Arabia and other Arab countries will help tackle medical problems in Saudi Arabia and encourage sorely-needed scientific research.

The collaboration between the private Saudi company, Danish firm CLC Bio and the Beijing Genomics Institute will make their sequencing of Arab genomes available on a public database.

"The advantage of the project is that it studies the differences between peoples, and that will explain the spread of specific illnesses such as diabetes, heart diseases, etc.," said Saeed al-Turki, Arab Human Genome Project Coordinator.

"Twenty-five percent of the Saudi population has, or is liable to have diabetes and that will form a big burden on health services," he said.

Almost one in four Saudis over 30 has diabetes, according to the World Health Organization. The project will help establish if the high incidence is due to a shift to urban living and rich diets among rural and Bedouin populations, as often claimed.

The project, with the backing of Prince Ahmed bin Sultan, a son of the crown prince, could also help establish a clearer picture of the historic migration of the Semitic peoples, who include Arab tribes, ancient Jews and others, from Africa into the Arabian peninsula.

Turki said the programme, costing up to 500 million riyals ($133 million), could stimulate research in Saudi Arabia.

The Arab Genome Project this year completed initial sequencing and analysis of its first volunteer, an anonymous tribal figure from Saudi Arabia, in the space of six months. By contrast, the King Abdulaziz City for Science and Technology (KACST) has spent six years trying to map the genome of a camel.

The genome team want to complete 100 results by the end of 2010 as part of an international "1000 Genomes Project" to establish a detailed map of DNA variations the world over (www.1000genomes.org).

There is likely to be some sensitivity in the historically and culturally diverse Middle East around the mapping, given the importance many people place on being of Arab descent.

Some Muslims are keen to claim Arab ancestry because the Prophet Mohammad was an Arab, and Islam and Arabic spread hand-in-hand.

"Tribes of the Arabian peninsula will account for 50 genomes and 50 will be from other Arab nationalities such as Egypt, Syria, Libya, etc.," said geneticist Ibrahim al-Abdelkarim. "It's a sensitive subject. People who speak Arabic call themselves Arabs but 'the Arabs' involve different groups."

Tribes of the Arabian peninsula pride themselves on having "pure" Arab origins and there are groups throughout the Arab world that embrace and reject Arab identity. (Editing by Matthew Jones).

08 نوفمبر 2008

Call for Papers: Codicology and Palaeography in the Digital Age

The reproduction of the European cultural heritage into digital resources is on its way. Among the various activities undertaken in this field, online catalogues of manuscrips have become an important research tool: Manuscripta Medievalia, for example, is a well established central catalogue in Germany. Important European libraries like the Bibliothèque Nationale de France, the British Library or the Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana have published their catalogues online. Directories with regional focus like the manuscript catalogue of Tuscany (CODEX) are seen alongside the European integrative project ENRICH. At the same time, the digitisation of the manuscripts themselves has gained momentum. What impact has this new situation on palaeographic and codicologic research?

Successful projects have shown that data that emerges from such cataloguing and digitising activities can be processed and enriched by digital technologies: there are algorithms to compare character patterns and enable palaeographic analyses. Comprehensive codicological data is available via electronic catalogues to allow statistical research on the archaeology of manuscripts. Digital editions embed images of their underlying manuscripts. Online resources enable web-based teaching of palaeography in a way far beyond the traditional facsimile collections.

The Institute of Documentology and Scholarly Editing (IDE) calls for contributions to an anthology on “Codicology and Palaeography in the Digital Age” to be published in Summer 2009. The purpose of this volume is threefold. Firstly, it aims at recording forward-looking digital work with manuscripts. This involves state-of-the-art technology as well as realistic ideas for future implementations. Secondly, it examines the field from the users’ perspective: how can codicological and palaeographic work benefit from digital resources and technologies? Are there new results that had not been possible before? Or is there at least a significant increase in efficiency compared to traditional methodology? We are therefore particularly encouraging contributions that describe research based on such digital resources. Finally, an outlook on the future development of the digital research on manuscripts will be given.

Possible topics for contributions can include but are not restricted to:

reports on research based on digital resources

Integration of and statistical research on data from manuscript catalogues

palaeographic databases (scripts, scribes, characters)

codicological databases (e.g. watermarks, book covers)

(semi-) automatic recognition of scripts and scribes

digital tools for transcriptions

visions and prototypes of other digital tools

teaching palaeography

The editors are open to proposals beyond these suggestions that fit into the outlined purpose of the volume. Contributions can be made either in German, Italian, English or French. The launch of the volume will be accompanied by an international symposium to which the IDE wants to invite the authors of the four best contributions to present their work.

Proposals of not more than 500 words shall be send by 30 November 2008 to:

Institute of Documentology and Scholarly Editingc/o Malte RehbeinMoore InstituteNational University of Ireland, Galwaymalte.rehbein@nuigalway.ie

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The Institute of Documentology and Scholarly Editing (IDE) is a network of researchers working on the application of digital methods on historical documents. Its members participate in important international research activities. The IDE, established in 2006, sees itself as a nucleus for IT technologies in the field of scholarly editing and documentology, understanding a historical document as a carrier for text as well as a physical object. To achieve this, IDE members take an active part in ongoing discussions, contribute reviews and research articles, organise conferences and workshops, counsel trend-setting projects and teach academic junior scientists.

In 2009 we will celebrate the 75th anniversary ofthe IFLA Conference which first took place inRome in 1928. This represented the first meetingfor the newborn International Foundation ofLibrary Associations. It has been 75 years sincethat remarkable and fundamental event and 45years since the IFLA congress was last held inRome. The World Library and InformationCongress will once more come back to Italy, thistime, in Milan from 23 to 27 August 2009 at theMilan Convention Centre which is the largest andbest equipped congress centre located in “FieraMilano City”.The city of Milan has been selected to host IFLA2009 following an extensive, intelligent andconstructive effort by the Italian librarians withinthe IFLA research commissions. It also reflects thegrowing presence at the international congresses,as well as the organisation of seminars andconferences and the translation of IFLA officialdocumentation. In particular this choice rewardsthe commitment of the Italian Libraries Association(AIB), which included the IFLA congress in Italyamong the priorities in its main programme....ThemeLibraries create futures: building on culturalheritage.Thanks to libraries, civilisations have gathered andstored evidence of their manual, scientific, artistic,literary, musical as well as religious activity.Assuredly, libraries preserve the bases and theroots of human knowledge. Knowledgetransmission today has radically changed: thescope of bibliography has widened immensely.Libraries therefore had to update their role:preservation and access are still the main points tobe achieved, though in a new, critical andprofessional way, in order to assure the adequatestandard of the service. In this way libraries keeppace with the change brought about by historyand technology, helping to shape the futurethrough the resources inherited from the past forexample cultural heritage. Century long traditionshave created a vast and diversified context, inwhich mediaeval libraries (mostly in monasteriesand universities), live together with Renaissancelibraries as well as modern libraries, whoseefficient standards promote public reading andresearch effectively.Libraries keep the balance between past andpresent and they turn roots into vital elements forthe future, paving the way to the development ofsociety, to promote better quality of life andencourage contacts between different civilisationsand cultures all over the world....

The Conference Announcement on the following link:http://www.ifla.org/IV/ifla75/index.htm

04 نوفمبر 2008

(Note: Click on the first result in each of the search results pages linked to throughout the post to see this feature in action.)

A scanner is a wonderful tool. Every day, people all over the world post scanned documents online -- everything from official government reports to obscure academic papers. These files usually contain images of text, rather than the text themselves.But all of these documents have one thing in common: someone somewhere thought they were they were valuable enough to share with the world.

In the past, scanned documents were rarely included in search results as we couldn't be sure of their content. We had occasional clues from references to the document-- so you might get a search result with a title but no snippet highlighting your query. Today, that changes. We are now able to perform OCR on any scanned documents that we find stored in Adobe's PDF format. This Optical Character Recognition (OCR) technology lets us convert a picture (of a thousand words) into a thousand words -- words that can be searched and indexed, so that these valuable documents are more easily found. This is a small but important step forward in our mission of making all the world's information accessible and useful.